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Awhile back,  I linked to Ambulance Driver’s bad day, in which he has a motorcycle accident.

Today he put up the full story.

In essence, a driver made a left turn in front of him, despite his due-diligence efforts to announce his oncoming presence at the intersection. She wasn’t drunk, wasn’t using a cell phone, had a perfect driving record, “Up till now”, as AD says.

She just didn’t see him.

I’m going to emphasize: any of us, at any time, could do something like this. We see what we expect to see. Our brains basically mock up well over half of our visual field at any given instant. The vision system was not evolved to work at highway speeds. This time a motorcycle happened to be in a blind spot, but it could have been a pedestrian, or an SUV.

Friend Pat is a bike rider (she’s even been a racer).

And I’ll say it again: the things that make life worth living are the things that can also hurt us the most, even kill us. You want to talk about a serious risk of heartache, try having kids. I’m only an uncle, and nothing like this has happened to any of the kids in my life–but enough to know that if you want a pain-free life, don’t have kids, and don’t let anyone you know have kids.

Fuck that shit. Fuck that shit till its ears bleed.

Safety is an illusion.

Go out, live your life, do the things that give you joy. Sooner or later, though, no matter how careful you are, either you’ll make a mistake, someone else will, or sheer random chance will confound you. Even if you just lie in bed, quaking with fear, eventually your heart will blow out.

Live your life, and extract as much joy out of it as you can, doing whatever it takes.

I’m gonna be extra careful at intersections for a while, though.

I’m a tool user, and proud of it.

I’m also a clumsy idiot, which means I occasionally sometimes at least once a week either cut a finger tip or break a nail. My experience is that even if the original injury is negligible, over the next day or so, it gets infected and becomes very annoying. Therefore, I’ve gotten pretty rigorous about putting some triple-antibiotic ointment on even the smallest finger wounds, and applying a bandage.

I long ago gave up on the standard strip bandage. My favorite bandage is the fingertip bandage, which has an hourglass shape that allows it to fold neatly over the tip of the finger. Unfortunately, I can’t buy just a box of these; they always come packaged with knuckle bandages, which are great if you scrape a knuckle, but…well, I’ve got three boxes of knuckle bandages, and no fingertip bandages.

So, I’m about to order a couple of boxes of fingertip bandages online. While hunting down a source, I found this page of how to use all sorts of interesting adhesive bandages.

Press Ganey is an outfit that does…uh, something having to do with… um, making hospital administrators feel good about themselves, maybe? Their mission statement:

For more than 20 years, Press Ganey has led the health care industry with a clear mission based on partnership, results, solutions, support, and care.

In other words, their mission statement is:

We have a mission statement.

One of the things they do is to give doctors awards based on patient satisfaction surveys. It seems that doctors are properly skeptical about this methodology.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

Here’s the award:

Why would anyone want a health care award that looks like this:

Show ▼

…And the Federal Government wants to help.

1-800-SUICIDE is a privately owned, non-profit phone network that provides anonymous suicide counseling. A few years ago, they made a terrible, terrible mistake: they accepted a grant from the Federal Government.

Now the feds want to take control of the phone number. Likely result: instead of anonymous counseling, you get the cops.

I do not even know how to express the rage I am feeling as I type this.

I’ve said this before. I’m going to say it again now. I’m going to say it over and over and over until it sinks in:

We do not trust the government to read our mail. We do not trust the government to stop us on the street and ask for our papers. We do not trust the government to listen in on our phone calls. We do not trust the government to come into our homes and businesses and search our records or our belongings.

And yet, many of you f… — excuse me while I suppress a stream of shrieking profanity — many of you think you can trust the government with your health care? With the intimate personal records that it requires? Are you mad, or just so [deleting foul word] stupid that you cannot manage your own lives and in fact deserve to have your most intimate secrets in the hands of the people that want to turn 1-800-SUICIDE records over to the police? While taking half or more of your salary, and condemning you to a lifetime of filling out mind-numbing forms for the privilege of doing so.

God. Damn. You.

Wake the fuck up!

These people do not want to help you. They want to own you, every hair on your head, every cell in your body, every base-pair in your DNA. Every thought in your brain, if you give it to them.

Stop already. Just stop.

Because if you give them yours, they’ll take mine too, and if that happens, I will kill myself.

But I will take as many of them with me as I can, rather than let them take me away, and turn me into one of you.

God Damn You.

You asked for this.

The next President of the United States will probably give it to you, good and hard.

“Them,” Dave? “They?” Who “Them”? That’s crazy talk, you know.

SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Adminsitration. Currently running 1-800-273-TALK, a competing suicide hot line. If you call this number, knowing that it is run by the feds, you deserve every single degrading humiliation they inflict on you, you idiot. Better you should just kill yourself now, OK?

Department of Health and Human Services

And the usual suspects, like the IRS, the DEA, the BATFX….

Please see “Comment Policy” over in the sidebar, to your right, which points to a spam comment I edited for my evil pleasure, just like the policy says.

I’m making this post specifically so I can put  “Bud Hookup” tags on it, in the hopes that this will pop up in a web search next to their ads.

In a Land of the Truly Free, these filthy scammers would be driven out of business by homegrowers. They’d be forced to fall back on outright burglary and mugging, and would be shot by citizens exercising their right to keep and bear arms.

If you’re wondering, Bud Hookup is one of a number of businesses selling unspecified plant material packaged and marketed to make you think you’re getting a legal substitute for marijuana. (It is, of course, in the sense that baking soda is a “legal substitute” for cocaine.) See this Cannabis Culture article, “Fake Buds Exposed!” for the debunking.

On the other hand, I have to admit that anybody who would spend $50 on unknown dried leaves and then smoke or ingest them in any manner at all pretty much deserves whatever happens to them.

Still: Hookup?

Eat shit and die slow, you lying spamming scum.

Now, dammit, I have to remember what it was I really came here to write.

[update]

Woo Hoo! Number four on Google in less than 24 hours!

[click for readable full size]

OK, I think Edward Kennedy is very high on the list of evil people in Congress, but that doesn’t mean I wish him undignified suffering and death.

Instead, along with Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred, I “fervently hope that the good Senator from Massachusetts finds the best health care that Cuba or Canada has to offer. We know the choice as to where he receives treatment will be [a] difficult one, but the senator is a recognized and distinguished authority on the shortcomings of the American health care system. We are certain his choice will serve as an example for all Americans.”

Superstition kills.

EL SOBRANTE, CA (KGO) — The Contra Costa County Health Department is closing East Bay Waldorf School in El Sobrante until Monday because of a whooping cough outbreak. More than a dozen cases have been reported.

In the East Bay, a contagious disease has shut down an entire school.

Whooping cough has made more than a dozen kids sick. It’s easy to avoid with a simple vaccine.
…
Students attending California schools are required to get immunizations for whooping cough but parents can opt out.

The state averages a 99 percent immunization rate. But at East Bay Waldorf School, health officials say less than 50 percent are protected from the disease and say that’s why it was able to spread so easily.

“We believe the immunizations are quite safe. And in particular case of an outbreak like this is the appropriate choice for their parents,” said Contra Costa County Health Services Director Dr. Wendel Brunner.

The school’s administrator Morgan Cleveland issued a statement, saying: “our community is following the direction of the county health authority. We look forward to re-opening school on Monday with the county’s cooperation.”

The Waldorf School System was founded by Rudolph Steiner in 1919. He believed children were made stronger through illness and believed in a holistic approach to medicine.

Life is risk. The trick is assessing the risks intelligently. The known risks from vaccines, while potentially severe, are extremely rare.

The risks from the diseases many of them prevent include disfigurement, disability, and death, and entire unprotected communities can be hit.

I’m uneasy, in the extreme, about requiring parents to dose their kids with anything. However, I’m also so extremely disgusted with, and more than a little frightened by, the ignorance and knee-jerk defiance that resulted in this outbreak.

One of my catch-phrases, Larry Niven’s “think of it as evolution in action”, certainly applies here, but it is tragic that it is the children who suffered from their parents’ stupid neglect.

Full disclosure: I have a niece and nephew in California who attended Waldorf grade school. I’m relieved that they survived, and I hope they are fully vaccinated now.

Via Curmudgeonly and Skeptical, although I’m not sure Rodger agrees with me.

I’ve edited the title of this post about six times, but I think I’ve got it right, finally. Someday I’ll learn how to edit my stuff before posting.

Dr. Edwin Leap tells us a story from the ER:

We expect it from a child.  From little ones with lacerations and dog bites, broken bones and IV placements.  ‘Daddy please!  I want to go home!  Can we go home now?’  We’ve seen it untold times in our medical lives.  And there the daddies stand, holding the hands of their precious sons and daughters.  They may be tough as iron, but they tear up as they see the pain and fear in their children’s eyes.  I’ve seen some get angry, and threaten me, or threaten to scoop up their little prince or princess and run out the door, even as they knew it would be the wrong thing.

But yesterday, as I placed the local anesthesia in her gray-covered scalp, and as I placed the staples that would close her wound, my 93-year-old patient cried out, in the mist of her dementia, ‘daddy don’t let them hurt me!  Daddy, help me!’  And then, ‘grand-daddy, help!  Grand-daddy don’t let them!’

I did the math.  Her daddy was probably born around 1880 or so.  Her grand-daddy around the 1850’s.  Their faces were etched into her mind.  She might not remember yesterday, but she remembered the men whose arms held and sheltered her when she was a child.  And there, on that hospital bed, in the bright lights of the year 2008, when the world would have been almost unrecognizable to her father, or to her grandfather, she lay calling to them down the long ages.

Read the whole beautiful thing.

There are times, folks, when I really hate being a cold-hearted skeptic, when I almost despise myself for rejecting the promise of Heaven, of eternal Life after the death of my body’s meat. I understand all too well why people long to believe, and why so many intelligent, educated, compassionate folks do. I wish I could, I wish it were so. I can’t, though.

At a doctor’s appointment a few months ago, I weighed in at 246 pounds (including about 6 lbs of clothes; I report nude weight for the balance of this post).

I was told I needed to lose about 100 pounds, which would bring me to 140 lbs.

Since then, I’ve cut way back on careless eating (no more Stouffer’s mac and cheese with a quarter pound of kielbasa as a midnight snack, and–the biggest sacrifice–no more fast food and sodas. I particularly miss Kentucky Fried Chicken Original Recipe. I’ve had maybe 6 Cokes since I started, and I want to report that Coca-Cola really is the Food of the Gods when you drink it infrequently enough to pay attention to it). I’ve also started vigourously exercising at least 30 minutes a day.

My experience is definitely that carbs cause more trouble than fats and proteins. I.E., the macaroni caused more weight gain than the cheese and kielbasa.

My current weight is about 214 pounds. Whine: ▼

I’m looking to break 210 in a couple of weeks; I’m hoping for 200 by the end of May.

But–losing a hundred pounds? Is that even reasonable? Healthy? Friend Pat, who’s spent far more time than I have researching fitness issues, says no–a more reasonable target for my sex (male), height (5′ 10″) is about 175 lbs.

I found this “Ideal Weight Calculator“, which actually presents several different possibilities based on different methods.

A common medical recommendation for someone of my height (5′10″), age (54), and sex(male) would be 132-174 lbs, based on a Body Mass Index of 19-25; my BMI at 240 lbs would have been about 34 kg/m**2.

The “People’s Choice” target is 200 lbs. This is “the average weight that other people of [my] Age, Height, Weight and Gender would describe as their ideal weight.: [Emphasis in original.]

So, 165-175 lbs is not at all a bad target, and losing 65-75 lbs is gonna be a lot easier than losing 100 lbs. But 140 lbs wouldn’t make me a scarecrow. I should add, I was a bean pole until my late thirties, despite a horrendous diet and almost no exercise–I’ve had to work hard to get up to 240.

In the meantime, I’ve just put half a dozen shirts back in my working wardrobe, I’m on the last notch of my belt, and my resting pulse has dropped from the mid-90s to the low 60s. Blood pressure and blood sugar have gone down as well. I can even see the beginnings of an actual waist, a distinct narrowing below my rib cage, where before I believe there was pretty much a straight line, maybe even a bulge, between my ribs and my thighs. (I don’t know for sure, because I generally didn’t look at myself in the mirror.)

I’m pretty pleased.

[Update]

Hm, the BMI is, evidently, being deprecated in favor of the waist/hip ratio. If I’ve correctly followed those instructions, my waist is 42″, and my hips are 44″, a ratio of 95%.

The target is < 90%.

While that doesn’t seem to translate directly into “How many pounds do I have to lose?”, it’s at least fairly objective.

Too bad I didn’t measure myself from the very start, so I’d know how much I’ve improved. (I didn’t even own a scale until I was about a month into this.) My guess is that my W/H ratio was greater than unity.

Better yet, I should have taken pictures. OK, everybody who does not want me to post nude pictures of an old fat guy speak up in comments!

(I’m rather annoyed at how hard it was to find a good description of taking the W/H measurements. There are contradictory answers, no good pictures taken on non-perfect body types, nothing with a skeleton shaded in for reference, gah.)

[/update]

Stories like this, wherein Ambulance Driver and his five year old daughter teach an EMT class, are the reason why I click on his site three or four times a day, hoping he’s done another of his once or twice weekly updates.